SANKOFA DANZAFRO
Friday, October 19
Time: 10:00am-12:00pm
Location: Gibney at 280 Broadway, New York, NY
Teacher: Rafael Palacios, assisted by Yndira Perea
Live Percussionist: Feliciano Blandon Salas
Level: Intermediate/Advanced
Register: https://gibneydance.org
Register in advance to receive a 25% discount code to see the company perform at The Joyce.

Class Description
Enjoy an Afro-contemporary dance class with SANKOFA DANZAFRO’s artistic director, Rafael Palacios. Afro-contemporary is a dance technique created in Senegal at the Mudra-Afrique school, and is an exploration of contemporary dance supported by traditional dance. Class will be accompanied by a percussionist.

Rafael Palacios is a Colombian choreographer, teacher and dancer, researcher of traditional afro contemporary and urban dance. His experience as a dancer in Africa and Europe has been the basis for the founding of the Sankofa Corporation. His creations express poetics of ancestral and contemporary dance as an option of social bond and positioning of Afro-Colombian culture. With a trajectory of more than twenty years, the works of Sankofa have been presented in various cities and national festivals and have shown the diversity of Colombian dance in countries such as Jamaica, Brazil, Peru, Canada, United States, Spain, Uruguay, France and China; they stand out among others: Sun no blessing (2000), San Pacho ... Blessed! (2005), La Puerta (2006), Internship to Burkina Faso – work Short eternity (2009), Bunde for a little Black Angel (2011) and Dirty in the eye (2012).He has been a guest choreographer for the celebration of the one hundred and fifty nine years of abolition of slavery, with the work The City of Others (Mayor of Medellín 2010), The Summit of the Americas (Cartagena 2012), Inauguration of the World Games (Cali, 2013), First International Dance Biennial of Cali with the work The other hundred years (2013), and the 2015 Choreographic Laboratory with the work The Silence of the Drum.  He has also served as choreographer for the film We are hot (2016), as well as being in charge of the Choreographic Direction of the Zarzuela Cecilia Valdés, production of the Teatro Colón, Bogotá 2017. Palacios was the artistic director of the Silleteros Parade of the Flower Fair (2014 - 2016), Festiafro and the Carnival of Lights, Myths and Legends (2014 - 2015). In 2008 he received the National Dance Award from the Ministry of Culture with the work San Pacho ... Blessed !. His project, Steps on Earth, received mention of the UN as a good practice of Afro-descendant social inclusion in Latin America (Cali, 2010). In 2018 he received the National Prize for the Arts with his work The City of Others awarded by the Universidad de Antioquia.

About the Company
“Sankofa”, meaning, “to return to the root”, is more than a word, it’s an African philosophy that proposes that the past is a keyhole through which to view the present, and to be able to consider the future. This thought has guided the Afro-Colombian Sankofa Danzafro, founded by Rafael Palacios in 1997, as a space dedicated to training and creation in dance.

See SANKOFA DANZAFRO at The Joyce Theater – October 17-21 
http://www.joyce.org/node/4301
Showcasing powerful Afro-Colombian and Afro-contemporary dance with live drumming and singing, Colombian dance troupe SANKOFA DANZAFRO presents The City of Others. This episodic work about urban struggle and resilience is “judicious in form, resonant with meaning, and delivered in dance languages that run the gamut from diasporic African to Latinised hip hop” (The Financial Times). The City of Others demands the city be a place of coexistence; a place for everybody, not only a few.